Summarized for you – the aborted speech of Pope Ratzinger January 17, 2008

Among all the comments that have appeared on the thread of the previous post on the querelle over Ratzinger’s failed speech at the Rome University “La Sapienza”, there are a few that deserve to be highlighted.

It is the case of the following, by DB. He is answering a previous comment about the speech that Ratzinger sent to the University.

[…] By contrast I found the Pope’s speech easy to understand but quite confused and very tedious. If he had stripped out all the name-dropping and waffle he might have said:

“Universities were set up to initially to apply reason to help Christians further clarify the nature of truth as revealed in their scriptures. It was a purifying force that, in the early stages helped support monotheism while retaining and developing the riches of Greek philosophy.
Nowadays, universities spend their time on secular pursuits such as the natural sciences and humanities, and even philosophy is in danger of becoming completely separated from theology, pursuing reason for its own sake. All this has brought mankind great benefits but maybe that won’t last. Universities need to rediscover their roots and apply reason to understanding the spiritual nature of man.”

Unfortunately for Benedict, universities invested very heavily in theology in the past and ended up with the Scholastics, so they are likely to stick with what works. This is why his argument is rambling and confused, he explains how universities have achieved their modern success – by turning their backs on religion, and tells them that is probably a mistake!. Nice one, Benedict. […]

I also note that nowhere did the Pope speak of the death penalty, as his Vatican spin-doctors had claimed, but, as predicted, attacked, in his usual smooth and slick style, the secular values at the heart of modern universities.

If I were you […], I wouldn’t bother reading his speech again. Remember that you never need more than a quarter of your brain for religion, because it’s designed to short-circuit the reasoning part of your brain so you’ll be more docile and socially compliant. Think of it as a bunch of fairytales designed to placate those who psychologically can’t cope with personal extinction and to keep poor ignorant workers from asking why they are poor and ignorant. All the fancy stuff added by Benedict is just there to give an illusion of intellectual respectability.

“Universities were set up to initially to apply reason to help Christians further clarify the nature of truth as revealed in their scriptures. It was a purifying force that, in the early stages helped support monotheism while retaining and developing the riches of Greek philosophy.
Nowadays, universities spend their time on secular pursuits such as the natural sciences and humanities, and even philosophy…”

Reminds me of what my HS classmate (Stanford PhD, Geophysics..his dad was a UIUC theoretical particle physicist) told me, that Universities were created by the Catholic Church to “prove” their religion.

“You can never prove a theory, you can only DISPROVE it”
— Science maxim

So, lo & behold, the Church created a “weapon” (Universities & Reasoned Thinking) that DISPROVED their religion. Reductio ad Absurdum. As the saying goes, “Stupidity is its Own Reward!”

If the current age of scholastics arose from the church’s penchant for starting universities, then can it be assumed that a return to the same principles that created those universities could or would lead to another great age of scholastics?

[…] Summarized for you – the aborted speech of Pope Ratzinger I also note that nowhere did the Pope speak of the death penalty, as his Vatican spin-doctors had claimed, but, as predicted, attacked, in his… […]